


That AU Where What You Write on Your Skin Appears on Your Soulmate's Skin

by JeannetteRankin



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, informal style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-22 08:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18132797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeannetteRankin/pseuds/JeannetteRankin
Summary: right, but if i were in that au where whatever you write on your skin appears on your soulmate’s skin, you wouldn’t catch me pining away for 10k. i would just write my phone number and ‘text me’ and bam we’d get together in like 20 minOriginal Tumblr posts:xxx





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An old zimbits soulmate au, written in informal tumblr-fic style. I always loved this idea...maybe someday I'll clean this up and expand it. For now, just cross-posting it here from tumblr as-is.

right, but if i were in that au where whatever you write on your skin appears on your soulmate’s skin, you wouldn’t catch me pining away for 10k. i would just write my phone number and ‘text me’ and bam we’d get together in like 20 min

 

*

wait wait _shit_ , i thought of a way around this, at least for zimbits.

this is gonna be angsty.

See, in this universe, it’s somewhat taboo to try and contact your soulmate before you’re 18. parents usually try to prevent it, because they want their kids to stay in school and not run off to find their soulmate and make Bad Life Choices and wtver.

so naturally, it’s a rite of passage in middle school to secretly write some message to your soulmate (it happens at sleepovers a lot, like call-your-crush-and-hang-up but more metaphysical). So let’s say some of the kids at school decide to play a horrible prank on Bitty…

at some point in like 9th grade these two popular girls suddenly start hanging out with bitty, and he doesn’t have that many friends so he’s not gonna question it? and anyway they’re so nice, and pretty, and they appreciate his ice skating stories, so hey, it’s great. after a week or so, they invite him over to one of their houses to hang out together, and start talking about soulmates. eventually, they wind up convincing bitty (it takes some serious peer pressure, because he’s a good boy and his parents are strict about this as most southern parents are) to write his phone number to his soulmate.

little does Bitty know, they’ve arranged for Tyler, one of the Cool Popular Boys at their school to be in on their prank, and after bitty writes his number, bitty gets a text from Tyler being like ‘hello? is this my..soulmate?” and omg!!! bitty’s freaking out because Tyler is Hot and way cooler than him and he can’t believe his soulmate goes to his own school and…

the girls are laughing at him. they told Tyler to text him and pretend to be his soulmate. it’s all over school the next day and every person bitty sees is either making fun of him or pitying him. the girls he thought were his friends just smirk at him in the hallway.

he’s so crushed that it doesn’t occur to him until much later that his actual soulmate never did contact him. after that, bitty shies away from all talk of soulmates.

*

meanwhile, 19-year-old Jack, in a private rehab facility somewhere in quebec, hating himself, watching his dream fall apart and waking up every morning among the ashes of who he was supposed to be, notices a phone number and the words ‘text me’ appear on his arm one day. he can’t even bear to look at it. he disappoints everyone in his life, and he doesn’t need to disappoint his soulmate too.

he covers up the message with long sleeves, and after a few days it fades entirely away

 


	2. Chapter 2

Alright, so, a while back, I wrote a post about Jack and Bitty in the universe where whatever you write on your skin appears on your soulmate’s skin. Clearly in this world it’s incredibly easy for soulmates to get in contact most of the time, but I managed to finagle a way to make Bitty and Jack both strenuously avoid contacting each other via their soulbond, due to shame and mortification and traumatic memories on both sides.

A lot of y'all seemed to think that was mean.

If only for my own satisfaction, I wanted to work out how it would get resolved. So here is part 2 of Jack and Bitty as skin-writing soulmates…HAPPY ENDING WITHIN…

*

Alright, so, I’ve got Bitty, who avoids all mention of his soulmate, or any talk of soulmates. He’s the master of evading questions about it and changing the subject. Holster and Ransom are platonic (?) soulmates. Shitty and Lardo are often asked if they’re soulmates but refuse to answer. They just say the paint/marker/dye stains on Shitty’s skin are from him helping her with art projects. Jack isn’t the kind of person who really gets asked about soulmates that often. When he does, he stutters out a convoluted excuse without actually answering the question. No one is certain if Jack even has a soulmate or not. Ransom and Holster once or twice declare that Jack’s soulmate is his hockey stick, and try to wrestle it away from him to write on it and prove their theory.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON THIS UNIVERSE~~

The soulmate phenomenon began rather recently [*~so I don’t have to come up with too much history/cultural background around it~*]. It only started with babies born in like, the 70s (generation X was profoundly affected by this, and it is often seen as the final blow to traditional marriage structure in many western countries) and there’s all kinds of theories about what causes it. Some serious scientific lines of inquiry, some crazy conspiracy theories, some environmentalist alarmism that it’s caused by GMO’s or whatever.

Your soulmate is not random. What I mean is, your soulmate is generally someone from your own geographic region (not always!) and/or someone you would have run into naturally in life. So, someone who is a small-town boy and a home-body who never wants to leave the state is not going to have a soulmate on the other side of the world. However, someone who has an adventurous spirit and love of travel, might. If you never attempted to contact your soulmate directly, they would still almost certainly wind up in your life/in your sphere of experience in some way.

Is it okay to date outside of the soulbond? Hooooooboy. Hoo boyyyyyy. This is a very controversial topic. I mean, it’s not really a BOND in this universe. You’re not tied by a red string. It’s more like a signal from the universe HEY HERE IS A HIGHLY COMPATIBLE PERSON. HAVING THIS PERSON IN YOUR LIFE WILL MAKE BOTH YOUR LIVES BETTER. Of course for people who have platonic bonds, they almost always date or even marry other people. (Platonic soulmates marrying another set of platonic soulmates is a popularish trope in media of this universe.) A lot of people who have religious or culturally traditionalist backgrounds hold that dating outside of your bond is the Worst Thing. However, other people hold that it’s perfectly natural to date other people before you and your soulmate get together, because if you’re ~destined~ to be together, how could you mess it up?

NOW, how do Jack and Bitty feel about all this? Bitty (as we know, a master of avoidance of uncomfortable topics), just doesn’t think about it. He’s open to dating, and does date a few guys. After all, people without soulmates find love all the time. Maybe he once or twice has the thought that he’ll go on a date and it’ll magically turn out to be his soulmate, who will have an excellent explanation for not contacting him back in the day, and boom, happy ending. But the wound of feeling abandoned by his soulmate when he needed him is too painful to let him dwell on it. Mostly he just avoids the subject and stress bakes about it.

Jack’s situation is not that different. He occasionally thinks about his soulmate, but is too ashamed to try and contact them again. He doesn’t like to think about that time in his life. Anyway, he reasons that he just needs to focus on Hockey right now, and if his soulmate is really his soulmate, they would understand that anyway. Maybe it crosses his mind once or twice that after he wins a Stanley Cup championship, he will contact them. But as with most things, Jack has only the vaguest idea of what he wants or will do after his current Hockey Goals are accomplished. He just has his soulmate in the mental category of Part of the Bad Time and therefore To Be Ignored in Favor of Hockey.

(incidentally, Jack knows that his soulmate is several years younger than he is, because they went through the “draw all over yourself with magic marker” phase when Jack was about 7-8. Of course parents train their kids out of making marks on their skin as much as possible, because that would be way rude if they have a soulmate.)

So how will Jack and Bitty ever work this out? Obviously they both avoid getting marks on their skin as much as possible, since neither of them wants to deal with their soulmate issues. And bruises from hockey don’t transfer. So this situation could go on indefinitely, and they get to know each other in this universe pretty much the same way as in canon. And who knows how long their holding pattern might have persisted, with both of them having their soulmate right next to them, but oblivious.

Enter Suzanne Bittle and her remarkable small talk prowess.

For one of their playoff games in Bitty’s sophomore year (maybe the last home game of the season or something? Idk how ncaa hockey schedules work but WHATEVER, the point is it’s at Samwell and it’s a Big Game), a fair number of the team members have their parents there—maybe it’s a Samwell tradition to bring family to the last home game or whatever? Of course Bad Bob is there, because he is actually an incredibly loving and supportive parent and omg, I love Dad Bob so much ….so much……

And also Suzanne Bittle is there. In an echo of Parents Weekend from Bitty’s freshman year, Bob and Suzanne and Jack happen to be standing around talking after the game. Most people have already cleared out, and Bitty just went back to go pack up his stuff so they can all go to dinner afterward (arranged by Bob and Suzanne, much to Bitty and Jack’s mutual embarrassment.  _Parents_.)

They are making chit chat, as parents will, and get onto the subject of how their children got into playing hockey. Bob is telling the story he LOVES to tell about how Jack learned to balance on ice skates before he could walk, and he nearly pulls out his phone to show his favorite picture of ugly toddler Jack in one of those 90s baby snowsuits and teeny ice skates, but Jack begs him not to with a pained furrow between his eyebrows.

Suzanne, not to be left out, talks about how Bitty was GLUED to the TV during the figure skating in the ‘98 olympics, and when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up would reply in his little 3 year old voice, with perfect pronunciation “Tara Lipinski.”

“But,” Suzanne said, enjoying Bad Bob’s handsome French-Canadian chuckle at that anecdote (EVEN HIS CHUCKLE IS HANDSOME, DAMN), “I probably should have known even when he was a kid that he would take to hockey eventually. He was obsessed with the Thrashers when they were in Atlanta.He had their poster in his room for years. Why,” she laughs her tinkling southern belle laugh again, “one time when he was in fifth grade, he came home with one of those  _temporary tattoos_  of the Thrasher’s logo on his arm. And he was old enough to know better. Lord I was so upset with him….”

Suzanne trails off as she sees Jack and Bad Bob have utterly shocked expressions on their faces. They turn to face each other and start talking in French.

Bad Bob: The Thrashers’ logo, Jack do you remember…?

Jack, dazed: On his arm, and if it was when he was ten or eleven?

Bad Bob: You were fifteen…it fits.

Bob and all his extended family of hockey folks had been delighted and highly amused when fifteen year old Jack had spontaneously developed the Atlanta Thrashers logo on his forearm. “Well, that makes sense, of course your soulmate is a hockey fan,  _of course_ ,” had been the common refrain. Matched only by those lamenting that his soulmate didn’t have better taste in hockey teams. Bad Bob had told the story far and wide (maybe it even got out to the press?), and round-faced teenage Jack had been mortified (but also a tiny bit pleased?). The teasing had faded in time and they hadn’t thought about the incident in years. But now….

Worried, Suzanne looks between them and asks, “Are y’all okay? I’m so sorry if I said anything to offend you.”

“No, not at all, Suzanne,” Bob explains distractedly. “Excuse us for just one moment more.”

Jack, in french, still stunned: But how? What if it’s not—what if he doesn’t–

Bob, in french, taking Jack by the shoulders: Jack. Go get your boy.

Jack runs, literally  _runs_  toward the locker room (what a dramatic nerd), and behind him, he hears his dad saying “Suzanne, I should tell you something..” but he doesn’t stop to listen or to think.

Jack rushes into the locker room and sees Bitty, by himself, just zipping up his gear bag.

Bitty looks up at him and instantly sees something is amiss. “Jack?” he asks, wide-eyed. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Jack walks toward Bitty. He cups his jaw tenderly in one hand. He bends down and presses a kiss to Bitty’s lips. Nothing has ever felt better than this. Then Bitty starts kissing him back, and oh, wow, that’s even BETTER.

“…Jack? What…what was that?” Bitty asks, pulling back and looking dazed, holding onto Jack’s arms with both hands to keep his balance.

“I…” words seem to fail Jack entirely.  

Jack looks around. There’s a clipboard on the wall with a pen stuck through the clasp. Jack takes the pen, shows Bitty his hand and slowly, deliberately writes 'it’s me’ on his own palm.

Bitty, heart in his throat, unclenches his own hand and looks down at it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tags: #AND THEN THE GET MARRIED AND GET A DOG AND ADOPT A BABY AND BECOME TERRIFYING NEW ENGLAND A-GAYS THE END #and bad bob forever takes credit for getting them together (which suzanne very graciously allows him to do bc she still has a crush on him)
> 
> The end! Short, unserious epilogue up next


	3. Chapter 3

Part 3 of this au story, mostly for @confusedpumpkin

*

Later that night, Jack and Bitty lay together in bed. Bitty’s head rested on Jack’s chest and he was contentedly listening to his heartbeat while tracing one hand lightly over the muscles there. They’d been talking and kissing, kissing and talking, for hours. Bitty’d told him things he’d never told another person.

“Bitty,” Jack murmured. There was more emotion in his tone than Bitty had ever thought he’d hear from ‘hockey robot’ Jack.

“Hmmm?” he said.

“I just want to tell you…” 

“What is it, Jack?” Bitty could tell it was something important. He’d always been able to read Jack better than most people,  _but_ , he thought to himself giddily,  _that’s what happens when you meet your soulmate_.

“I just want to say that I forgive you,” Jack told him gently.

“You …forgive me?”

“Yes. For supporting the Thrashers.”

“…”

“You were young. You didn’t know any better. We’re going to work through this, together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original tags: #Bitty: (ಠ_ಠ) #Jack: honey they only made the playoffs ONCE and they got swept by the RANGERS #Bitty: i change my mind we're breaking up


End file.
